What were the Reece Committee’s findings? Judge for yourself based on the written summary of lead researcher to the Committee, Norman Dodd in his own words.

In summary, our study of these entities and their relationship to each other seems to warrant the inference that they constitute a highly efficient, functioning whole. Its product is apparently an educational curriculum designed to indoctrinate the American student from matriculation to the consummation of his education. It contrasts sharply with the freedom of the individual as the cornerstone of our social structure. For this freedom, it seems to substitute the group, the will of the majority, and a centralized power to enforce this will – presumably in the interest of all. (p. 11)

The result of the development and operation of the network in which Foundations have played such a significant role seems to have provided this country with what is tantamount to a national system of education under the tight control of organizations and persons little known to the American public. Its operations and ideas are so complex as to be beyond public understanding or control. (p. 12)

The broad study which called our attention to the activities of these organizations has revealed not only their support by Foundations, but has disclosed a degree of cooperation between them which they have referred to as “an interlock”, thus indicating a concentration of influence and power. … Likewise, it is difficult to avoid the feeling that their common interest has led them to cooperate closely with one another and that this common interest lies in the planning and control of certain aspects of American life through a combination of the Federal Government and education. (p. 10)

So, were the members of the Congressional Reece Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations a bunch of crazy “conspiracy theorists”? (cue spooky music)

You may now take your pick:

Either, the findings of the Reece Committee were false and defamatory indicating that the members of said committee were of a brand of “conspiracy theorists” who themselves may have conspired (huh?), to make a series of wild accusations against an otherwise well-meaning group of philanthropic foundations …

OR, you and I and the majority of those reading this have all, in some way, shape or form, whether we like it or not, through the institution of public education, been subjected to a mass-indoctrination campaign engineered by a small cadre of elite private interest groups targeting an entire population for purposes of social control, going back decades.

Those in the former camp who find themselves generally skeptical of conspiracy theories thereby doubting the ability of reality to be in contradiction with the perceived consensus of so-called “official” reports and the authority of officialdom in general, will find themselves in a double bind. Within such a worldview, what could possibly be more official than a public indictment bymembers of the United States Congress!?

Therefore, to be skeptical of the Reece Committee and it’s findings is in that case to be skeptical of the official story, and in so doing, the skeptic himself becomes the conspiracy theorist! Thereby the debunker debunks himself. Whoops-a-daisy.

For that matter, how is such a person to rule out the possibility that the very negative sentiments they maintain that are so ingrained against any notion of the possibility of conspiracy – sentiments which they believe to have arrived at freely on their own – are not in reality a product of the fruition of that “concentration of influence and power” aimed at “control of certain aspects of American life”, alluded to by the Dodd Report?

Such skeptics, often believing themselves to be exemplars of objectivity, readily dismiss those trees that do not fit within their preconceived view of the forest, as it were.

Consider the evidence that suggests it was none other than the CIA operating in the wake of the Kennedy Assassination who first employed the term ‘conspiracy theorist’ in a field memo discussing ways of discrediting narratives counter to the official story through the propagation of public disinformation campaigns.

By the various methods of disinformation described therein, consistently applied via mass media over decades and further refined for the internet era, the public is immersed in a deluge of propaganda that drowns out real skepticism, and whereby the unwitting are made to absorb a carefully constructed worldview, as if by osmosis.